PART I
I took a touch typing class in the 10th grade. The class was primarily intended for girls who wanted to develop clerical skills. The girls weren’t subtle in letting me know I wasn’t welcome, but I didn’t mind. Because knowing my way around a QUERTY keyboard is a valuable skill that I’m taking advantage of at this very moment.
During college I typed the requisite number of papers on my Smith-Corona, that I occasionally lent out other students, free of charge. Later, working as a radio news guy, I banged out a lot of copy. All of it was done on a specialized typewriter at the station that had only upper-case letters, just as the AP teletype printed everything in all caps. Pressing down those keys required a lot of force, but adjusting to the lack of a shift key didn’t take long; in fact, locking the shift key on the Smith-Corona became something of a habit for me.
I used a computer teletype keyboard in a college math class, but what I consider to be my first exposure to computer terminal keyboards was at the newspaper where I worked after leaving radio. (That was also when I first saw a markup language and how it formatted text.) The keys had a very different feel from the clunky typewriter at the station. I was amused by the system being from Harris, the parent company of Gates, that made the transmitter and mixing console at the radio station.
PART II
Many gamers and professional writers prefer spring-action mechanical computer keyboards over membrane keyboards. I have a rugged and relatively heavy mechanical keyboard that came with a desktop PC I bought over 25 years ago, from a long-defunct clone maker. Although the clicking is relatively noisy, the keys have a long travel distance with good tactile feedback. The keyboard was in daily use for almost ten years, until I bought a desktop PC that had plenty of USB ports but lacked PS/2 connectors. The last time I had need for that particular keyboard was to label slots in the Sony 300-disc CD carousel. I’m contemplating making some changes to the selections loaded in the player, so I’ll soon be pulling out ol’ reliable again.
It took a while for me to get accustomed to the lighter touch required for membrane keyboards. Especially on laptop computers, where accidentally activating the touchpad can be a major annoyance. (The touchpad on my Lenovo Yoga laptop is awful. I will never buy another Lenovo product again, based solely on this one deficiency.)
My Smith-Corona is long gone, replaced with an Epson dot-matrix printer that is itself no longer with me. But now, as with the resurgence in turntables and records, typewriters are making something of a comeback.
As mentioned in that video, Tom Hanks is a typewriter fan with a sizeable collection. This is the typed letter that Tom sent to Debbie Daughtry, who left WFMU and set out on her own to start Boss Radio 66. So now I send money to both stations.
